I attended an event at Hackerspace.SG Running your IoT devices on a low power, long range network, which showcased Lee Lup’s slides on SIGFOX at Singtel.

My thoughts are that the 12 byte payload is not really suitable for monitoring, but more for events.

• Door closed
• Bin’s full
• Some significant threshold exceeded

It’s not super good for monitoring since:

• payload is too small
• there is no accurate time
• you can’t monitor any less than 10 minute intervals

I found the people tracking / GPS use cases to be silly, since GPS needs a lot of power.

SIGFOX lends itself to well known fixed locations.

Fixed locations, such as public property that need maintenance and don’t have Internet connectivity for one reason or another.

I’m thinking:

• alerting to street lamps failing
• alerting to flooding
• alerting to when a bin is full & needs emptying
• alerting when a special door/gate is opened

I like how the SIGFOX station seems to send out Github style Webhook payloads to a payload URL.